the glory days

In being overseas the past two years, we feared we had missed the Glory days.

We visited Glory's grave the other day, and while Zion and Brave and Jubilee ran around among the headstones, Bright stood at Glory's stone and cried.

"She was my cousin," he sobbed into my T-shirt.  I cried too, and MoMo cried, both of us moved by the way children feel so deeply; moved by the way Glory's life touched so many.

We hung out with Kerry and Philip tonight, and we laughed and ate big bowls of cereal in our pj's and talked about Glory.  Kerry and Philip see their life with Glory as the best time of their lives.

"She wasn't supposed to live a week," Kerry said, smiling, "and we got her for 16 months."

They love to talk about her.  They love to drive by the cemetery where her little pink marker stands in the ground.  They love to look at her pictures.  Glory is everywhere in their home.  She is everywhere in this town.  She is part of our lives.  Kerry aches to hold her daughter, of course.  She aches in a way that no mother, who hasn't buried a child, can possibly understand.  And yet, there is beauty here.  Beauty, the likes of which I have never seen.

The Glory days are not gone.  The Glory days are here to stay.